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Writing Material Culture History Writing Material Culture History 228846.indb8846.indb i 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 Writing Material Culture History EDITED BY ANNE GERRITSEN AND GIORGIO RIELLO Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 228846.indb8846.indb iiiiii 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 CONTENTS Figures viii Contributors xii Introduction: Writing Material Culture History 1 Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello PART ONE The Disciplines of Material Culture 15 1 Material Culture and the History of Art(efacts) 17 Viccy Coltman 2 Father Amiot’s Cup: A Qing Imperial Porcelain sent to the Court of Louis XV 33 Kee Il Choi Jr. 3 Written Texts and the Performance of Materiality 43 Catherine Richardson 4 Material Culture, Archaeology and Defi ning Modernity: Case Studies in Ceramic Research 59 David Gaimster 5 Broken Objects: Using Archaeological Ceramics in the Study of Material Culture 67 Suzanne Findlen Hood 6 Anthropology, Archaeology, History and the Material ® Culture of Lycra 73 Kaori O’Connor 7 Identity, Heritage and Memorialization: The Toraja Tongkonan of Indonesia 93 Kathleen M. Adams 228846.indb8846.indb v 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 vi CONTENTS 8 Exchange and Value: The Material Culture of a Chumash Basket 101 Dana Leibsohn PART TWO The Histories of Material Culture 109 9 Spaces of Global Interactions: The Material Landscapes of Global History 111 Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello 10 Cosmopolitan Relationships in the Crossroads of the Pacifi c Ocean 135 Christina Hellmich 11 Invisible Beds: Health and the Material Culture of Sleep 143 Sandra Cavallo 12 Material Culture and Sound: A Sixteenth- century Handbell 151 Flora Dennis 13 Lustrous Things: Luminosity and Refl ection before the Light Bulb 157 Ann Smart Martin 14 Objects of Emotion: The London Foundling Hospital Tokens, 1741–60 165 John Styles 15 Material Culture and Materialism: The French Revolution in Wallpaper 173 Ulrich Lehmann 16 Time, Wear and Maintenance: The Afterlife of Things 191 Victoria Kelley 17 How Things Shape Us: Material Culture and Identity in the Industrial Age 199 Manuel Charpy 228846.indb8846.indb vivi 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 CONTENTS vii PART THREE The Presentation of Material Culture 223 18 The Return of the Wunderkammer : Material Culture in the Museum 225 Ethan W. Lasser 19 Europe 1600–1800 in a Thousand Objects 241 Lesley Ellis Miller 20 Objects of Empire: Museums, Material Culture and Histories of Empire 249 John McAleer 21 Interwoven Knowledge: Understanding and Conservating Three Islamic Carpets 257 Jessica Hallett and Raquel Santos 22 Reading and Writing the Restoration History of an Old French Bureau 265 Carolyn Sargentson 23 History by Design: The UK Board of Trade Design Register 273 Dinah Eastop 24 Handle with Care: The Future of Curatorial Expertise 281 Glenn Adamson 25 As Seen on the Screen: Material Culture, Historical Accuracy and the Costume Drama 303 Hannah Greig Online Resources Compiled with the Help of Claire Tang 321 Index 329 228846.indb8846.indb viivii 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 INTRODUCTION Writing Material Culture History Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello Why things? Just a few years ago, historians would have been sceptical about the value of engaging with ‘objects’ or ‘artefacts’. The expression ‘material culture’ was equally alien to historical studies and mostly confi ned to the realm of the investigation of the remote past (pre-historical and ancient) or non-Western societies. Today we speak instead of a ‘material turn’ in history. On both sides of the Atlantic as well as in many parts of Australasia, historians seem to have experienced a Damascene conversion to material culture. And this is not just limited to historical research. At some institutions, students are now introduced to artefacts as readily as to manuscript and printed sources. History textbooks inevitably contain chapters dedicated to ‘visual’ and ‘material’ cultures. This book is intended as a guide for students and teachers to understanding this new role played by material culture in history. We, as historians, are not the fi rst to address this issue and we approach it with a particular view on how and why our fi eld might benefi t from an engagement with material objects. 1 In this volume, we have brought together not just historians, but also art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, anthropologists, design experts, television consultants and art consultants. Each brings a specifi c viewpoint on what material culture is and how material culture engages with history. 228846.indb8846.indb 1 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 2 WRITING MATERIAL CULTURE HISTORY But what is material culture? The term material culture is defi ned in different ways depending on the disciplinary context within which the term is used. Historians have been using the label in a rather loose fashion, and sometimes simply take it to mean ‘objects’. The ‘material culture of domesticity’, for instance, might refer to the material goods that turn a house into a home in the past or in the present. These might include soft furnishings and textiles, crockery and china, knick-knacks and children’s toys. Even this simple list of material things or artefacts points to the fact that these might differ from similar objects that we fi nd in a hotel room. Unlike hotel rooms, our houses are full of memories that are conveyed through the objects that fi ll them. Objects have meanings for the people who produce and own, purchase and gift, use and consume them. Material culture therefore consists not merely of ‘things’, but also of the meanings they hold for people. 2 Meaning is a rather opaque concept. It emerges from the relationship between objects and people, but such relationships exist at the personal and individual level as much as they do at the public and collective level. For example, the children’s toys scattered on the fl oor in the front lounge serve as a fi rst indication that children live in the house. These might have very different meanings: for the children who play with them, the parents who bought them, the friends who gifted them, never mind the producers and sellers of the items. Such toys can then be seen as tokens of affection that bind parents and children in a specifi c time and place. For the child, however, they might be treasured for very different visual and tactile properties that are appealing to a child, which in turn create a different set of meanings and memories. The toys scattered on the fl oor are therefore not just material objects but they point at the affective, social, cultural and economic relationships that form our lives. This present- day example is useful for us to ask more historical questions: were there toys in a similar household in the past? And, if we can trace them, did they have a similar or different function to today’s toys? What do they tell us about childhood in the past and about the relationship between parents and children? Indeed historians are well aware that past households were not just different, but also that the meaning of childhood and of the affective bonds between parents and children were constructed differently throughout time and space. In this case the analysis of toys can become a powerful instrument to unearth a different world, one that might not be well recorded in written documents. However, we should be aware that ‘material objects are not, and have not been, just caught up in an ever- shifting world but are actually creating, constructing, materializing and mobilizing history, contacts and entanglements’. 3 Objects themselves are not simple props of history, but are tools through which people shape their lives. The simple acknowledgement that objects can serve as a way of understanding and appreciating the past, does not necessarily explain why and how historians should engage with them. There are many fi ne historical 228846.indb8846.indb 2 007/10/20147/10/2014 16:0316:03 INTRODUCTION 3 accounts that do not consider either objects or material culture. The engagement and usefulness of material culture depends on the questions that we ask. A researcher interested in analysing the historical process of ‘imitation’, usually between people from different social and cultural classes, also referred to as ‘emulation’, might well benefi t from including in his or her study the objects and materials that formed part of this process. A scholar interested in the philosophical thought of Hegel, however, might fi nd little help in engaging with material culture methodologies. There are, generally speaking, three ways in which material culture has enriched history. Firstly, by complementing other sources: the understanding of the written and visual sources of the past has been strengthened by including the material legacy of that same past. Secondly, by making historians ask new questions: by including objects, the study of emulation, for example, is no longer a mere concept, but is understood as a series of material practices based on the production and consumption of goods. Thirdly, by leading historians to new themes: by using objects, historians have begun to explore new areas of enquiry ranging from how people dressed in the past, their emotions, their taste and even the ways in which they related to the imagined and real world that surrounded them. History’s engagement with material culture History has long been seen as the discipline in which its practitioners engaged in the analysis of textual documents and communicated by producing more texts. 4 The archive was the historian’s second home. This maintained the traditional boundary between history and art history, the latter being interested in fi ne art, in particular two-dimensional artefacts such as paintings, prints and drawings.
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